Oct 6, 2025
6:30pm to 7:30pm
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2025-10-06T00:00:00
2025-10-06T00:00:00
America/New_York
Yale Career Panels: A Candid View of the Legal Profession
Yale Career Panels: A Candid View of the Legal Profession – October 6, 2025
This event is the 71th in a series of events covering different professions and career issues. There have been 56 Yale Career Panels, 11 Yale Career Fireside Chats, 3 Career Advice and Networking events and 1 Yale Career Conversations event. Organized 14 years ago by a group of Yale alumni volunteers, these panels strive to provide candid, unvarnished views of featured professions and opportunities for career advice and networking.
The concept is to have a diverse panel of lawyers in different areas of the law, who will provide candid views of their profession. Our three panelists represent different perspectives: a Magistrate Judge, a general counsel, and an associate at a private law firm.
This virtual event will feature a 45 minute panel followed by 15 minutes of Q&A.
Time: Monday, October 6, 2025 from 6:30 pm to 7:30 pm EST
If you would like to join us for this event, please register at:
Registration: http://yalecareerpanels-10-6-25.eventbrite.com
Topics:
• How do you get into the profession and what is the typical career path?
• Where is the profession heading (good and bad)?
• What are the myths versus the realities?
• What are the characteristics of people who tend to do well and are happy in the profession?
• What types of people tend not to do well or end up unhappy and why?
• If you don’t stay in the profession until retirement, what are the exit routes to other professions?
Panelists:
Peggy Kuo, Magistrate Judge, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of New York
Yoon-jee Kim, Counsel, O’Melveney & Myers LLP
Osamu Watanabe, General Counsel, Moelis & Company
Moderator and Organizer:
Patricia N. Takemoto, Legal Assistant, Friedman & Wittenstein, A Professional Corporation
Biographies:
Peggy Kuo
Magistrate Judge Kuo was appointed on October 9, 2015. She received a B.A. summa cum laude in history from Yale University in 1985 and a J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1988.
Judge Kuo clerked for the Honorable Judith W. Rogers with the D.C. Court of Appeals. From 1989 until 1993, she served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the District of Columbia. From 1994 to 1998, she was a trial attorney and then Acting Deputy Chief of the Civil Rights Division Criminal Section at the U.S. Department of Justice, where she investigated and prosecuted hate crimes and allegations of police misconduct throughout the United States. From 1998 to 2002, Judge Kuo prosecuted war crimes and crimes against humanity at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands. Her historic trial regarding mass rape in Bosnia became the subject of the documentary film, “I Came To Testify,” part of the series Women, War & Peace.
Upon her return to New York, Judge Kuo became litigation counsel at Wilmer Hale, LLP. In 2005, she was appointed Chief Hearing Officer at the New York Stock Exchange, where she presided over hearings involving violations of federal securities laws. From 2011 until her appointment to the bench, she was Deputy Commissioner and General Counsel of the New York City Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings, the largest municipal tribunal in the country.
Judge Kuo was born in Taiwan and moved to the United States at the age of three. She was awarded a German Chancellor Fellowship by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 1993 to study the German criminal justice system. She is a former President of the Federal Bar Council American Inn of Court, an active member of the Asian American Bar Association of New York, and former Vice-Chair of Manhattan Legal Services.
Yoon-jee Kim
Yoon-jee Kim is a corporate counsel in O’Melveny’s New York office. She represents clients in the financial services, life sciences, and other sectors on capital markets and global M&A transactions, including registered public offerings, tender offers, exempt offerings under 3(a)(2), takedowns, and Rule 144A/Regulation S offerings.
As a seasoned securities advisor, Yoon-jee is equipped to counsel public companies on a wide range of corporate governance matters, including their SEC reporting obligations.
Yoon-jee holds a B.A. in the History of Science and the History of Medicine from Yale and a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.
Osamu Watanabe
Osamu Watanabe is General Counsel at Moelis & Company where he leads the Firm’s legal and compliance department.
Prior to Moelis & Company, Osamu was General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer at Sagent Advisors. Prior to that, he held senior positions at UBS, Credit Suisse First Boston and Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. Osamu started his career in private practice at Sullivan & Cromwell, working in New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Melbourne. He also clerked for the Honorable Morey L. Sear, Eastern District of Louisiana. Osamu holds a B.A. in History from Antioch College and a J.D. from Yale Law School.
Patricia N. Takemot0 (Moderator and Organizer)
Trish Takemoto is a Legal Assistant at Friedman & Wittenstein, P.C., a commercial litigation firm in New York City. She is an active member of the Association of Asian American Yale Alumni (AAAYA, www.aaaya.org ), a national 501(c)(3) organization.
Previous Yale Career Fireside Chats and Yale Career Panels
The 56 previous Yale Career Panels have covered architecture, artificial intelligence (two times), biomedical, biotech, boutique consulting, consulting (five times), education, entrepreneurism (two times), film and drama, finance and investing, fintech, global health, healthcare and data services, internet and data services, investment banking (four times), investing (twice), K-12 education, government service, journalism and publishing, legal (five times), medical (five times), medical devices, music, non-profit organizations (twice), politics - the election process, post-Ph.D. non-academic careers, product management, R&D, real estate, sales, social media and influencers, start-ups, a comparison of venture capital and private equity and a comparison of investing/investment banking/consulting.
In 2016, we started a series called, “Yale Career Fireside Chats.” This series spotlights issues and opportunities which may be encountered during your professional career. So far, our 10 fireside chats have covered “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion,” “Managing Major Career Changes,” “Serving on Boards,” “The Art of Networking,” “Cybersecurity”, “ Managing Your Career in a Covid-19 Downturn,” Lessons from Kevin Ryan, a Veteran Entrepreneur,” “How has the Pandemic Impacted our Careers and Work-Life?,” and “How to Ace Your Interviews”, and “The Art of Effective Self- Assessment”.
In 2022, we started a series called, “Yale Career Conversations” that gathered attendees around virtual tables with a person at each table who is in the profession. The first one was on Investment Banking and Investing.
In 2024, we started a special event, “Advisors and Networking” where we brought Yale alumni in different professions together with Yale students and alumni in a virtual ballroom where they could meet with each other, share advice, and find mentors.
The recorded Yale Career Panels and Fireside Chats can be viewed at www.yalecareerpanels.com. The Yale Career Conversations and Advisors and Networking sessions, due to their structures, are not recorded.
The Series Sponsors
This series is jointly supported by various organizations at Yale University and Yale Alumni organizations, including the Yale Office of Career Strategy, the Yale Alumni Association (YAA), the Yale School of Management, Students and Alumni of Yale (STAY), the Junior Class Council (JCC), the Yale.nyc (the Yale alumni association in New York City), and the Association of Asian American Yale Alumni (AAAYA).
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